The invention pertains to a door having a door leaf which can be moved between an open position and a closed position, and a guide rail arrangement to guide the movement of the door leaf.
Doors of this type are used in the form of garage doors and industrial gates. The door leaf can consist of a plurality of panels, which are hinged to each other along axes which are perpendicular to the rail element. In these types of doors, also called sectional doors, the door leaf is in a substantially vertical plane when in the closed position and is usually in an overhead horizontal position when in the open position. So that the door leaf can be guided between the closed position and the open position, a guide rail arrangement is provided. This arrangement has at least one rail element which is substantially vertical and parallel to the lateral edge of the door leaf when the door is closed; a rail element which extends overhead in a more-or-less horizontal direction and is parallel to the edge of the door leaf when the door is open; and a circular arc-shaped rail element, which connects these other two rail elements. The substantially vertical rail element can be attached by a plurality of angle-shaped fastening elements to the wall containing the opening to be closed by the door leaf.
To assist the opening movement of the door leaf, a counterbalancing device is usually provided in the form of, for example, a tension spring or torsion spring arrangement, which is tensioned during the course of the closing movement and relaxed again during the course of the opening movement. The counterbalancing device is usually connected to the door leaf by a tensioning mechanism attached to the lower edge of the door leaf. During the operation of doors of this type, it is possible for the user to be injured by coming into contact with the tensioning mechanism when reaching into the gap formed between the substantially vertical rail element and the wall. To solve these problems, angle frames with two sidepieces are usually used. The sidepieces extend over the entire length of the substantially vertical rail element and form an angle of approximately 90° with each other. The first sidepiece is attached to the wall, the second to the rail element, so that the second sidepiece makes it impossible for anyone to reach into the gap formed between the rail element and the wall. Doors with these types of angle frames are described in, for example, DE 10 113 847. Pressed-out sections are also provided in the angled frame, with the help of which, in cooperation with a latching bolt attached to the door leaf, it is possible to prevent the door leaf from moving when such movement is not desired. It is thus possible effectively to prevent the door from dropping and also to prevent it from being raised.
Nevertheless, it has been found that it is comparatively complicated and therefore correspondingly expensive to install these types of doors in which the rail element is attached to the wall by an angle frame. Doors of this type are also indicated in EP 1 114 908A2. Sliding doors with a protective element assigned to a guide rail arrangement are described in U.S. Pat. No. 5,398,902.